Bhagavad-gītā is a conversation between Bhagavān—God in the form of a loving personality—and Arjuna, a noble prince who finds himself in despair. In the course of an exchange that stretches over 18 chapters the seed of friendship in Arjuna’s heart evolves to love for Kṛṣṇa, then beyond, to sweet surrender, a self-less devotion toward God. Despite its title (Song of God), Bhagavad-gītā is not a song about God, but rather about the liberation of the soul through loving devotion.
A devotee is someone in a mood of devotion to another. Devotion is a special kind of relationship, one we don’t find in our everyday lives. It’s a kind of relationship that is not recognised or valued in modern social relations. In the modern view we would be foolish to look for devotion in public institutions or business practices. And yet if we peel back the false sophistication and pretences of modern life, we will find it there: inspiring, animating, motivating, generating hope, creating trust.
Few would doubt that devotion is the most powerful kind of relation that can be. The power of love is immense, some would say endless. It is the most powerful bond imaginable; the proof is all around us, if only we suspend the biases of ‘reason’ and let ourselves be transported by its power.
Devotion is a relation without constraint. It’s not codified or institutionalised. It’s not a logical or structural relationship. It cannot be expressed by certificates or formal agreements. Devotion is a relationship between hearts, between souls, a relationship based on love, deep self-less love. And though few would deny the power of loving relations, the norms and values of social life somehow disqualify it. The irresistible emphasis on individuality and its principles, individual rights, individual freedoms, individual responsibilities—all these make devotional relationships marginal or invisible.
In our age we tend to understand the individual as a concentration of ideas, as an empty form, a container to be filled with experiences of the physical world. Yet we know intuitively that without relation to other individuals, to other souls, the individual is lonely, empty, even lost.
Or at least so it would seem on the surface. Yet when we pause a moment, take a breath, close our eyes, we see that the energy at the heart of all human action and all human creation from the most moving poetry, to the fastest car, to the highest skyscraper, all finds origin in expression of love, passed from soul to soul to soul.
We know this. We see it around us every day. We know it because we feel it, we feel an awareness, an attraction to the souls of others, a longing for a deeper relation to others, and through our relation to others, a deeper relation to God.
In a world where ‘relation’ is understood as ‘network’, Bhagavad-gītā gives an understanding of relation as the circulation of spirit, in the form of energy.
In the chain of loving relations, from me to you, from you to another, relations that unite one heart with another, we find the loving of custodian of loving energy, Rādhārāni, the divine source, and goal, of love.
Rādhārāni is the beloved consort of Kṛṣṇa, the one who is cherished by God himself. The love that captures Kṛṣṇa is the love that animates every heart and every soul of the whole universe. A magnet of the world’s desire, all love flows from her, and all love finds its way back to her. If we feel love for a mother, a lover or a child, then this love is only borrowed from the endless resource of love that is Rādhārāni. If we give or receive love in any of its forms, it is because Rādhārāni is working in our hearts, gently directing the flow of love toward us, through us, then beyond us.
Rādhārāni is the purified source of love that lies in the heart of every jīva, every living soul. No effort is lost that seeks to clear a path for this love—through our words and deeds, our gestures and movements, our lives and loves—to uncover it within us, help to liberate it in others.
The more clear the path to our hearts, the more the love in our hearts can shine, the more purity we will bring to our lives, and the closer we will come to Rādhārāni. And the ultimate goal of life, of anyone who venerates love above all things, is to become a servant of of love itself, the helper of the goddess of love.
Every relationship that has the slightest grain of love in it, from the most timid smile, to the most modest wink of the eye, to the butterfly of emotion in the stomach, is sign of Rādhārāni, herself part and parcel of God, inside us.
Realising her presence in us is the first step in our journey toward a life in which the love behind our every action is no longer hidden, but fully embraced and realised. Once we identify the loving spark in our hearts, we can navigated by it like the North Star.
We are all evolving spiritually day by day, some faster, some slower. Our highest state of our spiritual evolution will be obtained when we understand ourselves as souls and, at least as importantly, when we understand others as souls as well. It is the day when meeting someone on the street will be meeting of two souls, instead of a meeting of two bodies, two incomes, or two social positions.
The path to that day is called Bhakti. It’s goal is to assume fully our identities as loving, spiritual beings, and to understand the highest value as serving others with love.
Service means giving, of course, but giving with the heart. Not giving with our material bodies, but through the love at our core. This is the highest function of the human being.